How to keep people from reading

[ArMaP]

I also wonder if its the book sales or the data that the big companies don't want to lose like if you offered amazon "hey we're gonna give your books away but we'll send you all that data on what people browse and search for and how many seconds they spend on each page and when they read on the pooper and what words they have to look up and what they search for after and everything you would collect from their kindles and you can use that data and sell it and train your ais to figure people out with it and everything we're just not gonna give you any cash per book anymore you can just have that data exclusive for free" I bet they'd take that deal in a heartbeat lol.

In the case that started this thread, the Internet Archive was freely distributing scanned copies of books, not the books' content as the Project Gutenberg does, and that's what the publishers were against, the free distribution of images of their physical books.
Although the authors own the copyrights for the text, the way the book was printed and the cover are, usually, a creation from the publisher, so that also has a copyright.

So, in this case, as they were copying physical books, there was no "data" they were losing.